Ronaldo's 3 Percent Lesson: A Star Fills His Own Seats, He Never Fills the League

Three per cent, and the number nobody puts on the slide

On 30 December 2022 Cristiano Ronaldo signed for Al Nassr. The contract was reported at about 200 million euros over two and a half years, and the announcement did what everybody expected it to do. The club's Instagram account, which had been sitting at roughly 853 thousand followers, gained more than two and a half million in under a day.

Because the signing landed exactly halfway through a league season, it produced something marketing almost never gets: a clean natural experiment. The same eighteen months, the same clubs, the same stadiums, with one variable switched on at the midpoint. Two sports economists, Dominik Schreyer and Carl Singleton, took it and did the obvious thing, which is to measure attendance at matches Ronaldo played in and at matches he did not.

Their paper ran in Contemporary Economic Policy in 2025 under the title Cristiano of Arabia. The finding, in their own summary, is that Ronaldo filled an additional 20 per cent of the seats in his home team's stadium when he played, 15 per cent of the seats in the stadiums he visited, and 3 per cent of the seats where he did not even play.

Sit with the third number, because the first two are not in dispute and the third is the whole argument. The spillover from the most followed athlete on the planet onto the rest of his own league, in the season he arrived, was three per cent of capacity. He sold his seats. He sold a good share of the seats in whichever ground he turned up at. He did not sell the league's.

The plan behind this series records the lesson as a single megastar re-rating an entire league's global perception, and notes in its own sourcing caveat that attendance and competitive depth lagged the hype. That caveat is not a footnote to this episode. It is the episode.

What the signature genuinely bought, which is a great deal

This series takes famous numbers apart, so it is worth being clear before that starts, and clearer than usual here, because the subject is a national programme rather than a company. What follows judges a marketing claim. It does not judge the policy, and the programme delivered several things it set out to deliver.

The distribution is the plainest of them. Before the signing the league sold its football into a handful of territories. Within a season it had deals across more than 130 countries through IMG, and by the 2025-26 season its matches were carried in more than 184 countries on more than 43 platforms, with ESPN in Africa, DAZN in Germany and France, Movistar in Spain, FOX across the Americas and Globo in Brazil. The league reported a 20 per cent uplift in annual international media rights revenue across two seasons. That is a real commercial outcome and it is directly attributable.

The attention was real too, and unprecedented for the region. Al Nassr went from an account almost nobody outside Saudi Arabia followed to one of the most followed clubs in world football. Search interest in a league that had never registered globally became measurable everywhere. Three more names of the same order followed within eight months, Karim Benzema to Al Ittihad, Neymar to Al Hilal and Sadio Mané to Al Nassr, and the summer 2023 transfer window came in at 957 million dollars on Deloitte's count, second in the world that summer behind the Premier League.

The political outcome arrived on 11 December 2024, when Saudi Arabia was confirmed unopposed as host of the 2034 World Cup, with a bid evaluation score of 419.8 out of 500, the highest FIFA has recorded. Whatever anybody thinks of how that came about, it is the outcome the sporting programme existed to support, and it was achieved.

And the sporting one arrived on 21 May 2026, when Ronaldo scored twice against Damac to win Al Nassr the league on 86 points, two clear of an unbeaten Al Hilal. It was the club's eleventh title and its first since 2019, and he was 41. The episode that follows is about what a signature can and cannot buy, and it would be a poor one if it buried that.

The decision: buy the attention, then buy the clubs

The order of events matters here, as it did in the previous episode, because the ownership arrived after the star rather than before him.

Ronaldo signed in December 2022 while Al Nassr was still a conventionally owned club. The structural move came six months later. On 5 June 2023 the Public Investment Fund took 75 per cent of four clubs at once, Al Hilal, Al Nassr, Al Ittihad and Al Ahli, converting each into a company with the remaining quarter held by an attached non-profit. It was announced as the first phase of a sports clubs investment and privatisation project, aligned to Vision 2030. In August 2026 the Ministry of Sport began transferring that remaining 25 per cent to the Public Investment Fund as well, dissolving the non-profit boards and moving the four clubs to full sovereign ownership.

So the sequence is: sign the most famous footballer alive, watch what happens, then take the asset onto the state balance sheet and spend against it. That is a defensible sequence. It is also the reason the usual scoreboard does not work here, and this is the lever the previous episode turned. In an ordinary case study the market supplies the verdict, because somebody independent has to pay a price. Here the owner of the clubs, the funder of the league's growth and the counterparty to most of the significant commercial arrangements are the same balance sheet. There is no outside buyer to disagree with the valuation, because there is no valuation and no buyer.

Which leaves exactly one metric in the whole story with an independent party behind it, and it is the one the plan already flags. A person either walks through a turnstile or does not. Nobody can book a stadium seat as an intangible. That makes attendance the honest number in this episode, and it is why the autopsy is built on it rather than on anything cheaper to move.

The retreat is now on the record too, which is what makes 2026 the right year to write this. Summer 2026 transfer spending came in at about 350 million euros, roughly 407 million dollars, down 26.3 per cent year on year and the lowest since the recruitment programme began in 2023, following a reported reduction in club budgets from the Public Investment Fund. Al Nassr's Financial Control Committee filings became a story of their own when the league's financial regulator declined to approve renewals for eighteen of the club's youth players. The club paying the largest salary in the history of professional sport was, in the same window, unable to register its teenagers.

The four numbers, and what each one actually counts

The plan lists four results: Instagram followers from about 5.2 million to more than 57.5 million, search interest up 30 times in many markets, YouGov Buzz scores nearly doubled, and a home attendance lift of about 20 per cent. Not one of the four is a business result. Three of them are reach or sentiment readings, and the fourth is the turnstile. Run the noun test on each, which costs one search per number.

The follower figure has a false floor and a doubled ceiling. Al Nassr had roughly 853 thousand followers before the announcement on 30 December 2022, and crossed five million within days of it. So the 5.2 million that the plan uses as its starting point is already a post-signing number, which means the growth the metric exists to demonstrate had finished before the plan's clock starts. At the other end, Al Nassr's Instagram account stands somewhere near 29 million in 2026, not the 57.5 million in circulation. The honest statement is about 853 thousand to about 29 million, a factor of roughly 34, of which the first six-fold arrived in under a week and before Ronaldo had kicked a ball for the club. And a follower is a single free revocable click. It is not a ticket, a subscription or a shirt.

The 30 times search interest is a ratio taken on an index rather than a count. Google Trends does not publish how many people searched for anything. It publishes a relative figure scaled from 0 to 100 against the highest point in whatever window you ask for. A 30x move on that scale describes the shape of a curve, not a number of people, and on a league that barely registered before 2023 the base was close to the floor. A large multiple on a near-zero base is arithmetic. It is also the case that the curve has been falling: interest stays above where it sat in 2019 and has been trending down since the 2023 peak.

YouGov Buzz is the most precise of the four and it measures the least. The question is whether you have heard something positive about a brand in the past two weeks through advertising, news or word of mouth, and the score subtracts the share who heard something negative from the share who heard something positive, on a scale running from minus 100 to 100. It is a two-week recall measure of noise net of complaint. YouGov's own published reading has the general public score going from 22 in August 2022 to 39.3 in 2025, and the score among football fans from 25.3 to 50. Both are genuine and the word nearly doubled is fair.

It is the part of the same series that does not get quoted that matters. The Buzz score peaked at 54.6 on 22 November 2023, eleven months after the signing, and the 39.3 reported for 2025 is roughly 28 per cent below that peak. The metric everybody cites as proof of the re-rating has spent more than two years going the other way. That is not a scandal. It is what a two-week recall score does after the news stops being new, and it is exactly what the plan's own caveat predicted.

Which brings the episode to the fourth number, and it is the only one with a physical ceiling and a person behind it.

The scoreboard

Every figure in this table is a reach reading, a sentiment reading, a reported attendance, a contract report or an academic estimate, and the table labels each one. The attendance figures are league totals divided by matches played and are reported attendance rather than audited paid admissions, which is the distinction noted at the end of the autopsy. The superstar effect figures are from a peer-reviewed paper and are expressed as shares of stadium capacity, not as percentage increases in headcount. The Instagram, Google Trends and YouGov figures are platform and panel readings, not company disclosures, and follower counts change daily so any figure for them is a reading taken on a date. Contract values for Ronaldo and Neymar are press reports rather than disclosed terms, since neither club publishes accounts. Euro and dollar conversions are approximate and taken at the rates reported alongside the original figures. Several publishers of record carrying these figures are blocked by the egress proxy used to research this piece, including thenationalnews.com, gulfbusiness.com, forbes.com and techcrunch.com, and the academic paper itself could not be opened at Wiley, SSRN, ResearchGate, RePEc or the University of Stirling repository, so its findings were confirmed through consistent search results quoting its abstract rather than by reading the paper directly.

The autopsy: the turnstile says the lift was the announcement

Here is the league's average attendance, season by season, across the whole arc.

In 2021-22, the last full season before any of this, the Saudi Pro League averaged 7,885 across a 16-club competition. In 2022-23, the season Ronaldo joined at the halfway point, it averaged 9,339. That is an increase of about 18.4 per cent, and it is the roughly 20 per cent lift the plan records. It is real and it is correctly stated.

Then came the first full season with all four stars in it. In 2023-24, with Ronaldo, Benzema, Neymar and Mané all in the league, the average was 8,159. In 2024-25 it was 8,355. In 2025-26 it was 7,736.

State the confound before the conclusion, because there is one and it is material. The league expanded from 16 clubs to 18 in 2023-24, which adds smaller clubs with smaller grounds and pulls the average down mechanically. Anyone comparing 2022-23 to 2023-24 is comparing two different competitions. So compare the ones that are the same competition. The 2023-24, 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons are all 18 clubs and 306 matches, and that stretch runs 8,159, then 8,355, then 7,736. Three full seasons of the most expensive squad assembly in the region's history, and the line is flat and then down.

And the number that does not need any adjustment at all: the 2025-26 average of 7,736 is below the 2021-22 average of 7,885, from the season before Ronaldo arrived. Three and a half years and several billion dollars after the signature, on the only metric in the story with a turnstile behind it, the league is slightly below where it started.

Now put the academic finding next to it, because the two say the same thing in different units. Schreyer and Singleton measured seats filled as a share of capacity and found Ronaldo worth an extra 20 per cent at his own home ground, 15 per cent at grounds he visited, and 3 per cent at matches he was not at. The plan takes that home-match figure of 20 per cent and attaches it to the league. It is the correct number pointed at the wrong noun. Twenty per cent is what a superstar does to his own fixture. Three per cent is what he does to everybody else's, and everybody else is most of a league.

The mechanism is visible in the anecdotes as well as the regressions. The most-repeated one from the first season has around 40,000 people at an Al Nassr continental fixture, and roughly half of them leaving when Ronaldo was substituted. Treat it as the illustration rather than the evidence. The evidence is that the league drew more people in the half-season when a signature was news than in any of the three full seasons afterwards.

The generous reading, and it deserves stating, is that attendance is not the only thing the programme was buying. Broadcast reach, sponsorship, the hosting rights and a domestic sporting culture are all legitimate objectives and some of them moved. The narrow reading, which is the one that transfers, is that the claim under examination was about re-rating a league, and the seat is where a league is re-rated or is not.

The control group, which is three leagues that already ran this

This is the rare case where the control group is not a matter of searching for one. Three leagues have run this precise experiment, the outcomes are known, and one of them is fifty years old.

Pelé joined the New York Cosmos in mid-1975 on a contract reported at 1.67 million dollars a year, into a league nobody watched. Before he arrived the Cosmos' best ever crowd was a little over 8,000. In 1977, his final season, they averaged 42,689 at home and set a league record of 77,691 against Fort Lauderdale. That is a larger effect, in raw multiples, than anything Ronaldo has produced in Saudi Arabia. The North American Soccer League folded after the 1984 season, seven years later, having over-expanded on the back of exactly that boom.

David Beckham joined LA Galaxy in 2007, and his effect was also measured academically rather than asserted, in a paper called Vend It Like Beckham. Major League Soccer did not collapse. It is now a stable league with its own stadiums, an academy system and a national broadcast deal. The difference between MLS and the NASL is not the size of the star. It is what was built underneath while the star was there.

Lionel Messi joined Inter Miami in July 2023, which is the closest comparison in time and the most useful in shape. Inter Miami's attendance rose more than 35 per cent. The league average rose 5 per cent to just over 22,000, the largest jump since 2011. MLS Season Pass took 110,000 signups on the day of his debut, a reported 1,690 per cent spike, and league sponsorship revenue hit a record 587 million dollars. Read those four figures together and the pattern is the one this episode keeps finding: the star's own club moved a great deal, the league moved a little, and the digital product moved most of all because it was the thing you could buy from your sofa the moment you heard the news.

So the portable finding is not that megastars do not work. They work, reliably, on their own gate and on their own club's following, and they work immediately. The finding is that the effect is local to the star and that it decays at the speed the news does. What decides whether a league is left better off is entirely the thing built underneath during the window the star buys, and the NASL is the standing proof that the window closes whether or not anybody used it.

Saudi Arabia has plainly used part of its window. The hosting rights are secured, the broadcast footprint is real, and four clubs now sit inside a sovereign fund with the patience to run them. What has not moved is the week-in attendance of an average fixture between two clubs nobody signed a superstar for, which is what a re-rated league would look like.

The right order: name the metric, hold the turnstile, build under the star

The first step is to say what each number counts, in one sentence, before it goes near a slide. Not what it is called. What it counts. A follower is a free revocable click. A Google Trends value is a position on a normalised index, not a number of people. A YouGov Buzz score is a net two-week recall of whether anybody said anything nice. A ticket is a person who left the house and paid. These are not interchangeable and a deck that lists them in one column is claiming they are. This exercise takes twenty minutes and it is the highest-yield twenty minutes in marketing measurement, because it usually kills two of your four headline numbers before anybody external does it for you.

The second step is to find the metric in your own business with a physical ceiling and defend it. Every business has one. For a league it is the seat. For a restaurant it is the cover. For a clinic it is the appointment. For a software company it is the seat that renewed. These metrics are unpopular internally precisely because they are hard to move, which is exactly why they are the ones worth tracking: a number that cannot be inflated is a number that will tell you the truth on a bad quarter. Report it monthly, next to the reach numbers, and let the gap between the two lines be the conversation.

The third step is to treat any anchor asset as a window rather than an outcome. If you sign the famous person, buy the sponsorship, take the stand at the big show, the correct question on day one is what gets built before the attention decays, and the honest planning assumption is that it decays fast. Write down what the asset is buying time for, put a date on it, and review it on that date. The NASL had seven years and used them to expand rather than to consolidate. That is the whole difference between it and MLS, and it was a decision rather than an accident.

For a mid-sized Saudi company the practical version is smaller and more immediate, because the anchor asset is usually a person rather than a footballer. It is the founder with the following, the celebrity endorsement, the one rainmaking salesperson, or the single large client whose logo does the selling. The test is identical: how much of the result survives that person leaving. Run it on paper before you find out, by listing every deal in the last year and marking which ones would have happened anyway. Most companies here discover that the anchor is carrying more than anybody admitted, and the useful part is that the discovery is cheap in September and expensive the week after the resignation.

And be careful with the word awareness. Awareness is real, it is worth money, and it is the first thing to move and the first thing to fade. It buys you the meeting. It has never once bought the second order, and a marketing function that reports awareness without reporting what happened at the turnstile is reporting the easy half.

The takeaways

The measured league-wide effect of the most followed athlete alive was 3 per cent of stadium capacity at matches he did not play in. The 20 per cent everybody quotes is his own home fixture, and the difference between those two numbers is the difference between a star and a league.

The attendance series settles it without any argument. 7,885 in 2021-22 before he arrived, 9,339 in the half-season he arrived, then 8,159, 8,355 and 7,736 across three full seasons with four superstars in the league. The 2025-26 figure is below the pre-Ronaldo one.

Check the baseline of any growth claim, because it is often already an after number. Al Nassr had about 853 thousand Instagram followers before the announcement, not the 5.2 million usually given as the starting point, and the account is near 29 million today rather than the 57.5 million in circulation.

A multiple on an index is not a multiple on a count. Google Trends publishes a 0 to 100 relative scale, so a 30x rise describes a curve and not a number of people, and the curve has been falling since 2023.

Read the whole series, not the rise. YouGov Buzz for the league peaked at 54.6 in November 2023 and the 39.3 reported for 2025 is about 28 per cent below that. The metric cited as proof of the re-rating has been declining for over two years.

Say plainly what worked. Broadcast went from a handful of territories to more than 184 countries, the 2034 World Cup hosting was secured in December 2024, and Ronaldo won the league with Al Nassr on 21 May 2026 at 41. Distribution and political outcomes moved. The weekly gate did not.

Frequently asked questions

This article is part of BMD's marketing case-study series. Episode 20 is the fifth of the Gulf run. Episode 21 is a target that was announced for 2030, hit in 2023, and then raised: a country that went from effectively no leisure tourism sector to more than a hundred million visitors a year, and the question of whether the marketing built it or the visa did. That is Visit Saudi and Vision 2030.

Sources and further reading

About BMD

Most companies don't have a marketing problem. They have a marketing department that was never built. BMD is a boutique consultancy that installs structured, measurable marketing departments inside mid-market companies across the GCC. We don't run your campaigns, and we don't hand you a strategy deck and leave. We build the operating system: the structure, the measurement, and the ownership that turn marketing into a function leadership can rely on. The method is the BUILD framework, published and practiced: a book, an online program, a community of Gulf founders and marketers applying it, and diagnostics that replace assumptions with measurement. Delivered in Arabic and English, founder-led.

Redha Alayesh

A marketer with a software engineer's discipline and a scientist's mindset. Across 40+ marketing departments in the GCC, he built the BUILD framework to solve the problem he kept finding: capable marketers trapped inside companies that never built them a department.